'Clearly forgery': Watergate lawyer says Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn badly incriminated himself on live TV
Former Watergate attorney Jill Wine-Banks explained to MSNBC's Ari Melber that Republicans who signed onto a false document claiming to be an elector when they weren't and then submitted votes to the government is a crime.
While discussing the fake electors scheme on Monday, Melber played a clip of former President Donald Trump's campaign adviser, Boris Epshteyn, who effectively admitted to being part of the 2020 elector conspiracy on live television.
"Yes, I was part of the process to make sure there were alternate electors for when, as we hoped, the challenges to the seated electors would be heard and be successful," he confessed.
Reacting to this, Wine-Banks said she certainly would love to be the lawyer on the other side of his case, implying that it would be an easy win. Responding to Epshteyn, she said that he didn't do it legally because you can't create a fake slate of electors. It's fraud, she explained, to interfere with the election, conspiracy to interfere with an official congressional proceeding, and conspiracy to commit forgery within the federal laws and state laws.
"You noted that two of the states caveated their forgeries by saying 'this is only good in the event that the legitimate slate of Democratic electors fails,'" she recalled. "Then we become the electors. But the other states all said we are the duly elected electors. That is clearly forgery. And there is a forgery statute not for forging money, which is normally how you think of forgery, but for other government-related documents."
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Melber then played a clip of Epshteyn on Steve Bannon's show, trying to clean up the MSNBC interview.
"All I did was very calmly, methodically walk through the law," he claimed. "As the legal team, it was our job to make sure every constituency was covered. So, hence the process that was undertaken. It was loud and clear on MSNBC that, one, President Trump won the election. Two, that it was stolen. Three, a legal case was laid out."
Wine-Banks shot down every point he tried to make.
"There was no contingency in existence," she said to Epshteyn's claims. "It was clear who won the votes in that state. We have a rule where we count the votes of the people. Not the people who wanted it to be somebody else. But if you vote, your vote gets counted. You vote for an elector and only that elector can represent you and cast the ballot at the Electoral College. We should amend the Electoral College Act. We should eliminate the Electoral College. We have ways of communicating that do not require the Electoral College as it was set up in a time there weren't the official communication methods that we now have. But even under the laws now, there was nothing legal about what they did. And the elector slates were certified or ascertained, is the official word, were ascertained by each state, signed off by the governor, and sent officially to the Congress to be counted."
Wine-Banks closed by explaining specifics of how this case is somewhat similar to the plots in the Watergate scandal.
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